In the English-speaking world, we tend to consider contemporary French philosophy from a high altitude, as from a jet cruising over a range of mountains: from a thick layer of cloud, a few majestic peaks emerge. Derrida, Deleuze and Lyotard are now behind us (and Althusser has been under a cloud for some years), but Rancière and Badiou, the twin peaks of that part of the range, are now in full view. Andrew Gibson, a bold explorer, just back from his notoriously successful ascent of Mount Badiou (see his Beckett and Badiou) has decided to reconnoitre the land that lies under the cloud and introduce us to a few of the minor foothills. Hence a book which has chapters on Badiou and Rancière, as might be expected in the current context, but also about three little-known, because as yet hardly translated, French philosophers, Françoise Proust, Christian Jambet and Guy Lardreau.

I am afraid this metaphorical beginning is unjust to Gibson, who is not merely a skilful interpreter of texts, not merely a passeur, who enables us to discover new vistas in contemporary French philosophy – a valuable task in itself, which Gibson fulfils with his usual attention to the details of the argument – but also a philosopher in his own right. And this he is in two ways. First, he not only reconstructs but actively constructs a tradition, the tradition of intermittency. For this is, according to Althusser, the task of the philosopher: to do things with words, that is actively to construct his object at the very moment when he is phrasing it.